"When it came time to reapply, I did so with someone who was widely recognized as one of the smartest technical folks on HN."
It's because I wrote this in a hurry so I didn't take as much time to polish the white spacing as I normally would, which makes it more difficult to read. The issue is that there are basically three or four separate ideas that are all chunkified together. I edited that sentence though to at least make it more clear.